Central Perk: Content Marketing Show: Key Takeaways

joi, 17 iulie 2014

Content Marketing Show: Key Takeaways

Posted: 17 Jul 2014 02:30 AM PDT

Today we are at the Content Marketing Show in London. Our very own Digital Consultant Charlie will be taking to the stage later this afternoon to share his knowledge, but before then we will be blogging the key takeaways from the sessions…

Can a brand ever truly be social – Stephen Waddington

Brands want to join the social media party. They try and adopt different personalities to “fit in” to the party.

Nice, but dim (Brands trying to associate themselves with unrelated events such as World Cup or Mother’s Day)
Nutters (Those who might associate themselves with serious topic and trying to make it a joke)
Automation (Big risk as the conversations do not flow)

Therefore it’s a good idea to improve the content that you share on the internet, including when working with your clients.

Social media is intrinsically human, so automate with extreme care.

How to use data for your content strategy – Jojo

Most data is already available (and free) so use it to tell your story. Tools to use for data include:

Facebook Insights
Google Analytics
Google Trends

It is important to present data in an interesting way. Try using these tools:

Gephi (can show network analysis)
CartoDB (mapping analysis)

Content marketing yearbook 2014 – Fergus Parker

Effective content marketing is not simple – it’s complicated! Success isn’t a straight journey as there are lessons to learn on the way.

£4 billion is spent on content marketing in the UK. There is £2.1 billion currently being used ineffectively.

Focus on 7 things to improve:

Inspire
Educate
Emotion
Belief
Meaning and purpose
Relevant
Authentic

Produce content for people who already have an audience. And make sure you know what they want.

Create an inbound marketing strategy in a boring industry – Jasper Martens

Look at the purchase decision funnel when creating content. Content can be done before the purchase, when people are a customer, and as a retention tool.

Create relevant content by answering questions that consumers have. It is important to be consistent and invest. Big ideas may have risk, but could also have big results.

Great content is shared, so be prepared and make sure the piece is hosted somewhere that can handle a lot of traffic in a small amount of time.

Data can be used to create interesting content that can be used by news services to support their reports. This can increase your visibility.

Alex Johnson taking over now, ready for the second session of the day at the Content Marketing Show. You can catch me on twitter @alex_cestrian

Why do we share stuff? – Emma Dunn – Caliber

Social Currency – stuff that makes them look cool/smart/in the know
Usefulness

When things are unexpected/surprising

Emotional triggers – amusement, anger, surprise
Stories – people love to share a good story, tap into emotional identity

What can being a poker player teach me about content marketing? – Andrew Tipp

1. Data – Be thoughtful, analytical- data can tell a story

Everything should begin and end with data (don’t be a content marketing cowboy!)

2. Tells – Look for insight and clues to make decisions from incomplete information

3. Expectation – Make content decisions with a positive expectation value – look at the long term goals

18-24 month strategies work well in looking at long term value

4. Research your opponents – Analyse what they are doing better than you!! What is their strategy/how are they gaining coverage?

5. Strategy - Be flexible in your strategy – different strategies for different campaigns

6. Winning – Is it all about the big win? – its all about picking up the small incremental win – most wins should be from the ‘bread and butter content’

7. Losing – Avoiding big losses is as good as creating big wins – test to make sure you’re not losing out

8. Folding – Know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em – don’t persist with content concepts that aren’t winning!

How a journalistic approach and a magazine mindset improves brand content – Steve Masters

The journalist mindset is all about finding a good story
The magazine mindset is about variety
Interviews improve storytelling – quotes bring passion, kudos and weight
Ask experts to give you quotes and include references and also contradictions
Conversation is key – interviews are not an inquisition
Listen for soundbites – they won’t come ready-made

How do you measure Content Marketing? The $44bn question – Andrew Davies

Content Marketing is now a $43.9bn industry
The big question is proving the value of content marketing
3 steps: Content Performance -> Audience Performance -> Business Performance
Measure your audience – build personas and measure
Don’t forget the individual
At this point, Andrew Davies offends northerners [ed. is a northerner...grrrr!]
From here it gets a bit confusing and very detailed, so I’d recommend you check out Andrew Davies’ slide deck – we’ll add a link here once its up online

Right, it’s now time for lunch at the Content Marketing Show, we’ll be back in a couple of hours with takeaways from the afternoon sessions, live from the Institute of Education in Central London… over and out!

Coming up….

4:30	Raph Goldberg	The Hero's Journey: using archetypes in video marketing
	Wes West	Making animation for the web
	Nichola Stott	Getting Past the Buying Objection with Problem-Solving Content
	Jess Collins	Types, tripe and how to get it right (types of content & how to make boring content inspiring)

16:30	Marcin Chirowski	How to organise successful international bloggers event
	Chelsea Blacker	Motivational Content Stories For the Down Trodden
	Charlie Williams	Gateway-drug content strategy elements you should use
	Lisa Myers	Running and motivating a creative content team

The post Content Marketing Show: Key Takeaways appeared first on White.net.

Competitor Analysis: Identifying your online competitors

Posted: 17 Jul 2014 12:30 AM PDT

Do you conduct any competitor research for the industry that you work in? If the answer is yes, then great. If it is no, then you are not the only one!

In my opinion, competitor research is one of the most underrated pieces of work completed. Often even if it is done, it is not used, and gets left on the desk, put in a drawer or, if sent electronically, not even read.

Why dammit, why?

Why dammit, why - Jackie Chan

This piece of research is essential to your online marketing plan, your strategy, and your business! It is key to understanding what is going on and what is required for your business to succeed or, at the very least, keep it afloat. Yet, so many people just don’t seem to care, or view it as a pointless task.

Well, over the next four posts I am hoping to change your mind. I want to show you what you can uncover with competitor research, and how it can all come together to influence your search marketing plan.

In these posts I am going to be discussing:

Identifying competitors based on search terms
Finding keyword & content opportunities
Understanding what content performs well
What coverage your competitors are getting, and why

But first I am going to start with identifying your online competitors.

Online is different to Offline!

If you have got this far, then you either don’t normally conduct competitor analysis or you want to know how and why to do it.

To start with, you need to ask yourself a few questions. Who are my competitors? What search terms are they visible for? Are those search terms of value to you? What are your competitors ranking for and should you be? How much money will it cost me to buy that traffic through paid search?

Luckily, there are tools available to help you do this. Some are paid, as you would expect, but they are worth the money if you are going to be constantly monitoring the landscape – which you should be!

So how do you understand who your online competitors are within search and what their visibility is? Well here is what I do in 10 steps…

*To complete these steps you will need paid access to both SEMrush & Linkdex.

Firstly, head over to SEMrush, type in your domain, choose the country that you want to analyse (SEMrush currently has 22 countries), and hit search. This will return a lot of data, but at this point you are purely focusing on the organic keywords and competitors, which you will find if you scroll down the page.
What you need to do now is to download all the organic keywords from the top 10-20 organic competitors. You can obviously choose more or less depending on the market that you are researching. To do this, simply click on the ‘Organic Competitors’ full report, then click on the competitor of choice. This will provide you with a list of keywords that you can simply download into Excel format. Go ahead and do this for your chosen number of competitors.
Now you have all the keywords, you need to merge them into a single spreadsheet, keeping all the data, and de-dupe them.
Now that you have a single list, you will need to spend some time going through the keywords and removing any that are unnecessary. Terms that include brand, jobs, recruitment, sales and anything else that isn’t relevant to your business and market, need to be removed. This will give you a much more accurate list of terms.
Once you have completed your list in Excel, you will need to import this data into Linkdex, keeping the Term, Search Volume and CPC data found in SEMrush. To do this, simply go to the keyword rankings function within Linkdex and bulk upload using their import tool. Choose the correct headings and let it gather ranking data for those terms.
Whilst that is happening, head over to the new ‘visibility’ feature that has recently been released by Linkdex. This feature is similar to that of SEMrush in that it tracks millions of keywords, but it also allows you to do some of your analysis side-by-side.
Once you are in the new feature, you need to start entering the competitors that you identified in SEMrush. Once complete you will start to see the table populate with terms that each domain is visible for.
The next step is pretty time-consuming, but is required. You will need to go through each competitor and add any keywords that are not currently in your list, but that are relevant to you. You may have to go and get the search volume and CPC data for these extra terms. This can be done by heading over to the keyword planner and adding in the terms as exact match and returning the data.
By time you have done this, you should have a very comprehensive list of search terms that you and your competitors are competing for.
Still in Linkdex, head over to the dashboards and create a ‘Competitor Detective Pro’ widget that looks at all of the keywords that you have added into Linkdex for checking. Once you have set this up and clicked OK, wait for the data to load and voila! Here are your competitors based on all the terms within the market, along with rankings by position, estimated traffic volume and how much that traffic is worth if you paid for it through PPC.

So there you have it, a list of your online competitors who are targeting the key phrases within your industry, along with ranking data, estimated volumes and how much it would cost. This data can be useful to understand where you currently sit in the search landscape vs your new found competitors. It will also likely throw up some competitors that you may not have thought were competing on similar terms. All this data can form part of your strategy going forward and inform the next steps.

In my next post I will talk about how you take this data and find new opportunities that your competitors are already taking advantage of.

Are you conducting any competitor analysis for your clients? Do you follow a similar process, or are you doing something completely different? I’d really like to hear your comments on my thought process and what you would do differently in the comments below or over on twitter @danielbianchini.

Flickr Image Credit.

The post Competitor Analysis: Identifying your online competitors appeared first on White.net.